perturber: A Stateless Service for Semantics-Preserving Text Perturbations
cs.CL
Submitted: 2026-10-08
Updated: 2026-10-08
Comments: 14 pages (6 main + references and appendix), 5 figures, 13 tables. Code: https://github.com/IBM/perturber
Code: https://github.com/IBM/perturber
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
The gist: Large language model (LLM) evaluations on clean benchmarks overstate model robustness: real inputs arrive perturbed, and these meaning-preserving variants routinely move model answers.
Abstract
Large language model (LLM) evaluations on clean benchmarks overstate model robustness: real inputs arrive perturbed, and these meaning-preserving variants routinely move model answers. Studying this systematically requires applying perturbations one at a time, reproducibly, and identically wherever they run, yet existing tools couple them to a benchmarking stack rather than packaging them as a reusable transform layer. We present perturber, a stateless service and Python library that applies exactly one semantics-preserving perturbation per call, drawn from a first-party catalog of 68 perturbations across 11 families. It turns on a single primitive, with composition left to the caller chaining calls, so the service and the library produce identical output by construction. We evaluate the tool itself, its correctness, reproducibility, and cost, rather than any model's robustness, measuring meaning-preservation per perturbation rather than assuming it. The demonstration adds a live playground, an introspectable catalog for benchmark selection, and a one-command reproducible evaluation.
Sources
- NL-Augmenter: A Framework for Task-Sensitive Natural Language Augmentation
- Scaling Synthetic Data Creation with 1,000,000,000 Personas
- AugLy: Data Augmentations for Robustness
- Brittlebench: Quantifying LLM robustness via prompt sensitivity
- PromptRobust: Towards Evaluating the Robustness of Large Language Models on Adversarial Prompts
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